5

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

When we get back ‘home’—Susie’s home, more a collection of random furniture and broken knick-knacks crammed within solid walls than it is a ‘home’—my mother shrugs off her jacket and throws it on the kitchen table. I set down the milk, the eggs and lube I carried under my own jacket. I keep the two packs of gum in my back pocket. Those are for me.

“We didn’t think to take any bread,” my mother says. She rolls her eyes at me, smiling.

Aren’t we silly? that smile says.

I sit down at the table and watch her as she moves through the unfamiliar kitchen, checking cupboards and drawers and back shelves. She finds a frying pan, a bottle of sunflower oil. A brick of cheese at the back of the fridge wrapped in grease-paper and mummified to something hard that crumbles to shards when she breaks off a corner.

“Parmesan,” she smiles at me. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.

She makes us scrambled eggs. Soft yellow lumps spiced with finely grated cheese. We eat in silence. Each mouthful is smooth and warm and familiar. The way my mother makes eggs: she gets them perfect every time. Never too raw and never too rubbery. Somehow they always taste the same, no matter how dirty the kitchen or how bare the supplies.

My mother, sometimes she can make anything beautiful.

***

We’re asleep watching TV when Susie gets back. My head in my mother’s lap, lost in something dreamless. When I slide awake it’s because the door opened at the wrong time in the sitcom jingle, and then slammed, and the sound was coming from behind us, not the TV. I keep my eyes closed, feel the rush of air and catch the shush of movement as he steps around the couch, then crouches down in front of us. I don’t know where he’s looking. If it’s at me, or at my mother. Or if his eyes are moving between the two of us, comparing and contrasting. What’s the same and what’s different. What’s better, what’s not.

After a moment, he sighs. There’s a hard tap and light clatter as he swipes the remote off the coffee table, a pop into sudden silence when he switches the TV off. My mother shifts and sighs, ready to wake up—or feign waking up, because I’m sure she was listening just as hard as me.

“Hey sleeping beauties,” Susie says. His voice is soft as sandpaper dusting raw wood—smooth, careful. Not rough or sharp or fast. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you in bed.”

***

When I wake up, I’m not always sure where I am. The places we sleep aren’t permanent the way it is for people in movies and, I guess, real life. Their beds, their covers, their cushions. The feel of the mattress, the angle of the light. They can wake up and stand up and still know where they are, even in pitch darkness. In the movies, the guys grope for baseball bats stashed under their beds. Women fumble for a light switch, a phone, whatever they need that’s on the nightstand. Like they know it will be there, because they put it there.

When I was little, I peed in closets and corners, too desperate and confused by the strange layout of rooms to know where the bathroom was. Too lost in strange dark. Now I know to hold it. In desperation, I once peed in a coffee mug. A dog food bowl. A kitchen sink.

Susie’s place is small, easy to navigate. There aren’t as many rooms to zigzag your sense of where things should be. If I peed in his coffee mug, it would be on purpose. If I peed in the corner, it would be out of spite.

I’ve mostly seen this town at dawn, at night. Susie’s house is a few blocks from the train station. It’s an easy morning walk down the deserted streets. Calm and quiet through the still darkness, a time when people speak in whispers even if there’s nobody else around. I like this town. I like the morning walk. My trappers boots—my new favorite shoes, bought for me at a city store six months ago—are smooth and quiet. Thick rubber, soft steps. My mother walks in ballet slippers, flat-footed so she can stretch her calves, her heels stuffed in her bag for later. We walk in the middle of the road, following the smooth black tar, the barrier line shining white between us. It’s too early for cars. Still, it always feels so daring—walking where people are not supposed to walk. The zippers and straps on our bags jingle. A few birds sing, their calls louder than they are when the sun is up and the traffic is thick and the world is all the way awake. I like the town like this; I wouldn’t want to see so much of it during the day, away from this easy calm, this cool air. The sun brings chaos; it changes everything. I sometimes don’t know myself: the ways I am, day from night.

Momma and me don’t talk a lot so early in the day. We’re still half-dreaming, the world other enough at that hour for us to half-believe the inner landscapes we’ve just left are sort of real—hill giants and secret histories and all. Sleep-sight tainting reality. A surreal mist, sliding over.

The walk from Susie’s house to the train station is twelve minutes, the way we go. A suburban backroad, a stretch of open path, then out onto the street that bends past the entrance in a staggered U. By the time we reach it, the day noises are catching up and the sky is brightening. We grab some coffee from the kiosk, we get our tickets. We board the first train, always almost empty, and I stretch out on the three-seater with my head in my mother’s lap. I drift inside the smells of coffee, perfume, cigarette smoke. Disinfectant. Scents caught in the fabric of her clothes, trapped in her hair, caught in the seats. I’ll be dozing when the train moves off—that gentle lurch before it starts rolling sets me straight to sleep again, or holds me down in the place in-between.

Sometimes falling asleep and waking up feel a lot the same.

The way a train moves, it’s like being rocked very gently. There’s a faint whirring sound, it speeds up into a rhythm, a steady staccato that moves up from underneath and paves the way for dreams.

I don’t dream so much, or so easily, in a stranger’s bed or on a stranger’s couch. Sleep in those places is greyed out, solid, featureless. Like running into a wall and knocking yourself out. So different to when I’m curled up on a coach liner or dozing with my head pressed to a rubber-sealed window, the buzz of turning wheels vibrating through my skull in a constant, swift tremor. Real sleep—and dreams—are easier for me when we’re in motion. My mother jokes if I ever napped on a surfboard out at sea, I’d dream in technicolor.

The people in my dreams come in fragments. Like portraits cut into puzzle pieces and then scattered, only the pictures sometimes move. A shoulder sticking out from behind a tree, elbow at an arc. Eyes watching me from secret places, sometimes wide and blinking, sometimes glassy and staring-white like smoky marbles. Or I only find signs of people—people who’ve just been here, people I’ve missed by bare moments. A loud conversation, echoing incoherent from across an unknown space. Excited or angry, I can’t tell. Footsteps in black mud, bare or booted, pressed deep and cut clear by the weight that made them. In my dreams, there are no buildings. I see open parking lots scattered with abandoned cars. I see sidewalk spaces, gutters, cutting through forests and fields of flowers. If I see a door, it opens to a hole in the ground. In the real world there are stories about these doors. Usually they’re stories about fairies. I know from those stories if you go through that kind of door you don’t always get to come out. I never open them, and those are the only doors I find in my dreams. I don’t dream about apartment blocks or backyards. I don’t see entrance halls or cottage steps. It’s like in my dreams, nothing that might have walls exists.

My mother’s right. Home for us doesn’t have to be a fixed place. I find it in slots of time, in slants of light. I feel it closest at dawn, when night and day meld and mingle a while before they drift apart. Home for me is my head in my mother’s lap, and those dreamscapes I see before I’m all the way awake. My jacket wrapped tight around me and my boots up on the seats. The tastes of toothpaste and coffee cloudy on the back of my tongue, the soft sweep of my mother’s fingers sliding through my hair. It’s me knowing, I can sleep a while longer. Thinking, I don’t have to open my eyes just yet.

There’s a safe space there, in the pauses between words. Comfortable and familiar as the shape of my mother’s thighs, tensed beneath my head.